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July 17, 2019 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:00:38
Edition 403 - Loyd Auerbach

Top US parapsychology researcher Loyd Auerbach on ghosts, ESP,remote viewing, time travel and more...

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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Well, we are past midsummer now, well into July as I record this a beautiful warm stroke hot day and we've had weeks and weeks of them.
Really, the summer got off to a very early start with some very hot weather and it's continued warm or hot.
For most of it, very little rain, a lot of cloud and some very bad air quality that for the first time I've noticed in London.
You know, people have talked about it for years and it's never really affected me until this year.
If you live around here, maybe it's affecting you too, but I'm finding that sometimes the air's thick.
And I really noticed it, I'll tell you when, when I drove to Liverpool, did my radio show from there and then decided to drive back over a couple of days through Wales.
And the air there was so clean.
Then I got back to London and 50 miles from London, it was a hot day.
You started noticing that the air quality was not good and the sky was a bit hazy.
Now, I remember seeing that in Los Angeles.
I remember approaching Los Angeles from the San Diego direction and this brown cloud hangs over LA and the air quality is not as good, especially around, you know, the peak driving times.
That's, you know, morning drive, evening drive.
And I think we're starting to experience that kind of thing here in London with a lot of still warm air.
Sometimes it ain't good.
And listen, I'm 15 or 16 miles out of the center of London, so I'm not exactly in the center of it all.
But it's something that we have to become aware of, I think.
What we're going to do about it, I've no idea, but I'll tell you something.
For the first time in my life, and I've lived here in London and worked here in London or out of London for more than half of my adult life, I've actually thought, well, is it time for me to relocate and go somewhere where the air is better?
Now, this place has been good to me, and it's been all I've known for years, but I've had that thought recently.
But, you know, me being me, typical Gemini, it's a thought that'll probably pass.
But I wonder if you live in a city too, and you're starting to think exactly what I'm thinking.
You know, I don't know.
Maybe it's an age thing.
Who knows?
Thank you very much if you've emailed recently through the website, theunexplained.tv.
These days, I'm trying to reply personally to as many emails that need an answer as I possibly can.
But please know that I see each and every email that comes in.
And if it requires action on my part, then that action gets taken.
You know, there are never enough hours in the day, but one thing I do do is to read all of the email, which is an awful lot more than you can say for an awful lot of the mainstream media that I've experienced.
And that's sometimes sad to see, that people will take an effort to get in touch with a media organization.
And I've seen this at some places over the years.
And people will take an effort to communicate with the organization on something that's important to them.
And the media organization just ignores it.
And that's something that I was determined when I started doing this, that I was never going to do.
The guest on this edition, good guest, Lloyd Hourbach, somebody that you've been asking for, U.S. researcher, and a man who looks at the paranormal and researching it in a completely different way.
You may well be familiar with his name.
A lot of people have suggested him to me.
So this time, we have got him, and hopefully this is the first of a number of appearances from Lloyd Hauerbach.
If you want to get in touch with me, make a guest suggestion for the show, say anything you want, go to the website, theunexplained.tv, designed and created by Adam from Creative Hotspot in Liverpool.
You can follow the link and send me an email from there.
You can also send me a donation.
Vital for this show.
As I've sometimes said, if you think about it this way, cup of coffee in America, $2, and that's a basic cup of coffee, £2 in the UK, minimum, absolute minimum these days, probably more like £2.50, maybe even £3 or dollars for an average ordinary cup of coffee.
You drink it within 10 minutes and it's gone.
And you might enjoy it, you might not.
This show, if you made a donation of a couple of pounds, then of course you can go back and enjoy it over and over again.
And the shows run for usually north of an hour every time.
So, you know, of course I'm bound to say that, but I think that's value.
You know, I'm doing my best here, but I think we offer value for money.
So if you can make a donation, bearing in mind this is a free show that asks for donations, then please do it.
If you have recently, thank you very, very much for doing that.
Okay, not going to go on about that.
No shout outs to anybody this time round, but two listener stories I'm going to tell.
One from Ricky and another one from Marty.
Marty, regular listener to the show.
In fact, Ricky's a regular too.
And I'll tell you those stories in just a moment.
But just to remind you, if you want to get in touch with me, tell me who you are, whereabouts in the world you are, and how you use this show.
Go to the website, theunexplained.tv, and you can follow the link and send me a message from there.
And like I say, thank you to Adam for his work on the website.
Okay, before we get to the guest, Lloyd Auerbach, on this edition of the show, let's tell those two listener stories.
The first one is from Ricky.
Now, let me tell you a bit about Ricky.
Ricky was very affected by a podcast I did a few years ago about a man called Richard Lenny, who uses night vision gear, high-grade night vision gear, to scan the skies and sometimes see really anomalous and unusual objects and things.
Ricky eventually got hold of night vision.
In fact, I think his partner bought that film.
I think it was his waifu, but anyway, whatever.
He was bought night vision, and he had the chance to look into the skies.
Now, for a long time, he didn't see anything.
Then he saw on one night two bizarre objects, and I'm going to quote from his email.
The objects were moving quite fast, and I would have only seen them for a second or two before they flew out of sight, but a strange thing happened.
One of the objects stopped on a dime, and I continued to track the object that was still whizzing through the sky.
Couldn't believe it.
The object that I was tracking then also stopped in the sky, and then shot off back the way it had come, and stopped dead again in the sky, and then shot off back the way it had come, and stopped dead again, right next to the first object, which was still sitting motionless, where it had stopped.
Both objects sat stationary for a few seconds, then the object that had gone back to the stationary one shot off overhead again, and a second later the object that had been sat stationary shot off to join the other one, and then they both flew off side by side at high speed.
He says, Howard, I'm not sure what this was.
Well, you know, we get more and more reports like that.
What could that have been?
Behaving in a way that aircraft that we know about apparently can't.
Then we come to Marty's story, Marty, regular listener.
It says, 1991, hunting in Colorado, we were climbing from a camp at 8,800 feet altitude to a pass to a tree line at 11,800 feet.
Three of us were walking up the rather steep path about 100 yards apart.
I was hiker number two in line as I reached a small bench where the pathway leveled out a bit.
Something ran from my extreme right to my extreme left very quickly, says Marty.
The low brush made noise and moved to whatever it was ran by very quickly.
It moved so quickly that I had a hard time following it with my eyes.
I estimate it ran 50 yards in total and it was invisible.
I was carrying a Weatherby rifle in 300 Weatherby magnum chambering, powerful enough to kill anything in North America and most animals in the world, but suddenly I felt vulnerable.
1991 was my second hunt there and I went again last October.
Of course, 27 years later, aged 72, I couldn't climb mountains like that and probably won't again.
But what was it that I'd experienced?
I didn't imagine it, and the brush wasn't high enough to obscure my vision of the area.
Perhaps there is something out there we can't see, something that is causing, as you say, Marty, people to go missing in ways that David Paulitis frequently reports in his Missing 411 books.
A great story, Marty.
Those are the things that leave you thinking, aren't they?
I wonder if anybody else, do you know whether anybody else has experienced anything like that?
Let me know, Marty, and thank you very much for that email.
Always good to hear from you.
Go to the website.
You know the address, theunexplained.tv.
Right, let's get to the guest this time.
Waiting in the United States is Lloyd Auerbach.
Lloyd, thank you very much for coming on the show.
Thanks very much, Harold.
You have, and I'm not going to go through what you call in America your resume.
We call it curriculum vitae here in the UK.
You have a most remarkable background because you are a combination of things, apart from your academic research work, but you're a combination of things, it seems to me, that you don't often see.
In fact, I don't think I've ever seen in combination before.
You are a ghost hunter.
You're a scientific investigator of things paranormal.
And you're also a mentalist.
How do those things gell together, Lloyd?
Well, you know, actually, I became, I got into magic and mentalism because of my graduate work in parapsychology back in the late 70s, early 80s.
We actually had a course part of our requirement, which was taught by a local magician dealing with psychic fraud and the principles of magic and mentalism.
So we'd really have a good understanding if we ran into people either outside the laboratory, even inside the laboratory.
And I just took to that.
I had actually done a little stand-up comedy in college.
So magic and comedy seemed to be really great for me just as a sideline and got really interested in it.
And I was incredibly pushed by a couple of my colleagues to not just learn about magic and mentalism, but to actually become a performer.
And one in particular, Martillo Truzzi, who was a skeptic, actually, he was a middle-of-the-road skeptic, had also been a member of the Psychic Entertainers Association.
And he pushed me and nudged me along the way until I moved out of magic and performing magic into purely mentalism in the early 1990s.
And it's been a very good association since then.
I would imagine it would be a good association because, I mean, this is a crazy example, but it's the only one I can come up with at the moment.
But, you know, Frank Abignale was a famous, they called him a paper hanger.
He was a forger.
He was a fake.
And of course, Leo DiCaprio played him wonderfully in Catch Me If You Can.
And of course, he was hotly pursued by the FBI, who got him in the end, but only got him because he was willing to be got.
But he became somebody who assisted the authorities in netting people who did those things.
In other words, he became a poacher-turned gamekeeper.
So if you're trying to identify fraud and malpractice in the field of paranormality and all of those things connected with it, of which we both know that since its history began, there has been a lot, then it would be a good idea if you had the techniques.
And certainly people like James Randi, that's what they've done over these years.
If you understand the techniques, then you're going to be able to spot the frauds easier.
Well, and that's a part of it.
What's actually been really eye-opening for me and interesting is how much the psychology of deception, psychology of magic and mentalism has helped me in doing field investigations and in understanding how people misperceive or mislabel events and experiences they actually have.
You know, most people that contact ghost hunters are not, they're not faking, they're not lying, they're not making things up, but they can misunderstand relatively ordinary things, although often rare things, that they were not aware of and mislabel them as paranormal.
So this has really helped me a lot in that area.
And you can understand the temptation to look for an explanation if you're not skilled and versed in these things.
Then if something is happening to you that you cannot explain, then you have to reach for an explanation that comes from the box marked unexplained, hence the paranormality.
Or you reach for an explanation if you're a disbeliever.
You reach for an explanation that makes absolutely no sense to cover your ignorance of what could be actually happening.
I've seen many instances where, you know, besides things that I think are really psychic, but I've seen instances that skeptics have just themselves mislabeled events that could be explained, experiences that could be explained if you had the background knowledge.
They've used explanations like mass hallucination, which really doesn't have any good evidence to it at all, or other things to cover their ignorance of an inability to look into the actual explanation.
Now, mass hallucination is an explanation that's been used, certainly as far as I'm aware, to explain a number of so-called close encounters, UFO style.
I'd love to see the scientific research in that because there's not very much at all.
There's really nothing that strongly puts mass hallucination as a good explanation for that.
No, well, I'm always very skeptical about that particular explanation when it turns up, because it just doesn't seem to fit the facts.
Either the thing is something that's been misinterpreted or it's a thing.
It's not, it can't be some kind of, I mean, how do you instill mental imagery of that kind into a mass group of people, which has been claimed on the map?
I mean, maybe it's possible, but I don't think so.
You can cause people to, you know, if they see something in the sky and there's somebody who actually is very confident and says what it is, whether they're saying it's an alien spacecraft or a satellite or whatever else, you can get people to go along with you on that explanation.
But the fact that they're seeing something is not hallucination at all, especially if you've got a photograph to go along with it.
You have, as we alluded a couple of minutes to, what I think is a pretty unique background because of your experience as a mentalist and also your academic background.
You know, normally when I talk to academics, then they're either people who are completely convinced that it's all hooey or they're completely convinced that there's something in it.
There's no middle ground.
And you seem to very comfortably span those two perceptions.
Well, I think a lot of my colleagues, the real researchers in parapsychology, many of them are convinced, like I'm convinced there is something to this, that there is something this facility that human beings actually have.
However, individual instances need to be looked at separately.
I often call myself a situational skeptic because even though I do accept the existence of ESP and psychokinesis and even evidence for life after death, each individual experience and instance needs to be looked at separately because that individual instance might have a different explanation to it.
And even the cases that I investigate, you know, I might find that there really is something psychic or paranormal happening in a case, but if you take all the events that are reported by people, all the experiences had around what they have identified as being the ghost, it's a very, very small percentage that really seems to be supportive of the ghost idea.
And the rest is explainable.
It's just that people, when they're on edge or freaked out or just surprised, they make those incorrect conclusions about everything.
And then they rope in everything once they have that traumatic or just simply surprising experience, they just start looking for everything that's out of the ordinary or seemingly out of the ordinary for them.
You know, most people who do shows of the kind in the genre of the one that I do, and I have done for many years, although I come from a hard news background, I mean, that's my field and that's the way that I try and do this show.
But most of us have not had any experiences of a paranormal kind.
I actually did have one.
And the reason I think it's a credible one is that it happened in a quite happenstance and matter-of-fact way.
I was doing a radio show, and I know I've told my listener this so many times, they're going to be bored to tears with the story.
But I was doing a radio show, and I went up to answer the call of nature three-quarters of the way through the show.
It was one o'clock in the morning.
It was a talk show, and it was into a long commercial break.
So I ran up the stairs.
It was in Liverpool.
And I came back to the studio.
There was only the guy who was doing technical operation behind the studio glass in the building, you know, big, big, prestigious tower in Liverpool.
And outside the door, a man appeared.
And I wasn't scared.
I was just surprised.
I was going back to do my show.
I was focusing on that.
And this guy, who looked like he was straight from the 60s, quite a short guy, dressed as like a watchman for a building would be dressed back in the 1960s, very shiny boots.
He was wearing a cap.
And as I looked at him and I was about to say, oh, hello, I didn't know there was anybody here.
And kind of, why are you dressed in 1960s clothes?
He disappeared before my eyes.
But what gave that credibility for me is that, well, a couple of things.
Number one, I'd no idea that other people had seen anything like this in this building.
But I wasn't expecting to see anything.
So it was a complete surprise to me.
I was not scared.
I haven't gone to a location where things had been reported and like an investigator from Scooby do expect to see them.
You know, I was involved in other things then.
But there I was, a rational person, very skeptical about it all, which I think you need to be to do this.
But there I had phenomena or a phenomenon appear before my eyes and then disappear.
And I described it to colleagues there, and they later said, yeah, other people have seen this.
So for me, I don't know what that was, whether that was a little recording in the fabric of the building or what it was, but maybe they're the best kind of experiences.
What do you say?
I'd say yes.
I think that, first of all, what ghost hunters do thanks to the TV shows is not what we've been doing in parapsychology for over 100 years.
They're doing stuff to try to get ratings really more than anything else.
The majority of people's experiences happen in everyday life.
They don't happen in the dark, typically.
Maybe a small percentage do.
They happen in surprising ways for people.
And if it's, you know, when you talk about being recorded into the fabric of the building, that's one category that we deal with is that idea of events being recorded.
And the most interesting thing about those that where I find people are surprised by is that living people leave those impressions behind, not dead people, just like living people make movies and TV shows, not dead people.
So when we're talking about everyday experiences with what people might call ghostly or paranormal, they're not uncommon.
They're actually, they may be rare in an individual's experience, but they're not uncommon across human experience and they're hardly paranormal.
Okay, does it have to be something that is repeated within that particular location a lot in order to imprint?
Or does it have to be something that's particularly impactful, like a death or something like that?
I mean, you've just implied that actually run-of-the-mill things and run-of-the-mill people can still leave their mark.
Yeah, actually, I think the most common, you know, first of all, we're not 100% sure exactly what the process is here.
We're looking at a couple different possibilities.
But what's really interesting is that what people report, first of all, the most common type of recording would be emotional.
And if people go house hunting, they often talk about walking into a house or an apartment and get a good vibe or a bad vibe, get a feeling about the place.
And, you know, excluding bad decor and smells that might be there.
You've been to my home then.
Yeah.
We have to do that.
There's this real thing about emotions somehow being left behind or being indicative of the people who lived there, not necessarily died there.
And the deaths itself would not, if somebody died in a place, that would not necessarily be enough to generate that recording.
But the grief perhaps that people felt, or if that person died in pain or an emotional shock, it might.
On the other hand, we have so many reports of positive, you know, people seeing people that seem friendly or get a good vibe or good feeling about a place.
It's just that the negative ones are the ones that people take notice of, just like the news.
Well, I mean, coming from a news background, you're absolutely right.
You know, people want, that's just the nature of the thing.
You know, you're going to sell more papers and more people are going to listen to your radio news if you're telling them something that's not necessarily good.
And you're not going to call a plumber if you just tell a plumber your pipes are working really great.
No, you're not.
So does what we've just been talking about then, the idea that imprints of things that happen and people's lives are more common than you would think, does that speak as far as you're aware and from your researchers to the idea that scientists are coming around to now, that there are indeed or maybe parallel universes?
I don't know that it's really related to that.
I don't think we need the parallel universe concept to explain that particular thing, that particular part of it.
Because what we're expecting is that somehow events are being recorded into the environment, whether it's through the geomagnetic field or some other field that's there.
And either our brains or our consciousness on its own can pick up this information.
So it's not necessary to bring in the parallel universe concept.
The only place that that really would play in with our work with parapsychology is if some apparitions, some, I guess you could say interactive people that people see as ghosts or as spirits, whether those folks are actually appearing, it's some sort of thinning of the barrier between universes, in which case they would see you as a ghost just as much as you would see them as a ghost.
But there's, again, there's no need for that based on what we've seen so far.
You know, there are places in England, I'm sure you're aware of them, you may even have been to them, where people report, quite sane people report, things like whole Roman regiments marching down the lane.
Yeah, and I tend to think that those are probably imprints of significant past events.
But then again, you know, it's always possible that we talk about parallel universe slippage.
There's also the possibility of time slippage, too.
A friend of mine years ago used to look, did look into those kinds of things that sometimes time skips in certain places and may even, we're not even sure what time actually is, whether time's arrow is truly the way we believe it is, we perceive it to be.
And if you do any reading in the physics of time, you'll see that there is all sorts of concepts, including the idea that there is no time at all, that it's purely a construct of consciousness.
And we have to try and get our heads around that because the common conception among ordinary people about time is that it is a linear thing and moves in one direction.
And actually, it may not be that way.
Correct.
And unless you kind of ease into it, and possibly if you ease into it from reading a lot of comic books and science fiction, it makes it much easier, which is how I started reading because I've actually gotten very interested in this particular subject years ago.
I even taught a course for John F. Kennedy University on the physics and philosophy of time.
But you have to kind of ease into it because it'll make your brain hurt.
There's no question about it.
Of course, over the decades, over the years, there are people who have claimed that they have traveled in time and that, in fact, experiments are being done, maybe even now, still being done.
You know, I interviewed a man called Al Bierlich.
I'm sure his name is going to be familiar to you from the Philadelphia experiment.
Al died, I think, about a decade or so ago.
But I interviewed him, I think, a couple of times on radio.
And he told a story that did not waver, did not change.
And it was about being catapulted forwards in time.
Right, right.
Yeah, and the Philadelphia experiment, a friend of mine years ago who was a science writer and science fiction writer who had been in military intelligence, and he had taken an interest in that case.
And he was pretty well convinced that what the Navy was testing based on all the data he saw was essentially an invisibility shield, just trying to a stealth shield kind of thing, which was hugely electromagnetic and affected everybody on the ship in various ways.
And we do know today that the geomagnetic field, for example, changes in that can be creating hallucinations for people and even experiences for people.
That's the work of Michael Persinger and others.
And we also have very controversial evidence that electromagnetic fields can cause other kinds of effects on the brain.
And yet, a lot of people who talk about the ability to do time travel, if indeed such a thing is possible, you know, their starting point is always electromagnetism.
Yeah, which is interesting in itself.
So the question then, you know, do we get back to the TV show Quantum Leap and say that what's happening really is their consciousness is transported through time or are they physically transported through time or is it something hallucinatory?
Is it just an experience that was created in their brains?
Yeah, no, I love that series with Scott Bakul.
I always used to wonder where he was going to be and what he was going to be next.
And I always used to think, I wish I could do that.
Sadly, there is no evidence that we actually can.
And one of the things that's always said, before we get off the subject of time travel, but one of the things that's always said, the late Art Bell, who I got to know in the latter stages of his life, and I'm sure you were on his show, Lloyd, you know, he used to say, if there's time travel, where are the time travelers?
And the only way that you can explain that away is if there is some kind of directive or protocol that means that time travelers who come here don't reveal themselves.
Well, Yeah, I mean, all the time travel science fiction typically says if you go back in time, you don't want to change anything because you might disappear.
So if that is true, if you're not, rather than creating an alternative timeline, if that is true, then of course they're going to keep themselves quiet because they don't want to change anything.
Okay.
I said we were getting off that subject so we can come back to it at another stage, perhaps in another conversation, because it is perennially, if I can say it, interesting.
ESP, the idea of communication between minds.
I mean, when we had our initial chat 15 minutes ago when we started this, you sounded very enthusiastic about ESP.
Sure.
Well, you know, the evidence for information transfer, I guess that's really extrasensory perception.
It's the thing to remember, it's perception that is different than our normal sensory perception.
So we consider that ESP, because nothing in the brain's been identified as a function or connected directly to it, we identify it as a function of pure consciousness itself, whatever you think consciousness happens to be.
And it includes, you know, picking up information at a distance real time from the past and, of course, from the future, and possibly connecting with other people's minds.
Although the whole mental telepathy communication process seems to be pure science fiction at this point, nobody reads minds, except maybe some mentalists.
We do that, but in a very different way.
The evidence for ESP in some form is quite, is not only good, but it's very strong in certain areas and our two main research lines that have been replicated.
So, you know, scientists who are skeptics often say there's nothing, it's not repeatable, it's not replicable.
But in the Gonsfeld studies, which involved a mild sensory deprivation, and certainly the remote viewing studies done that were done, civilian studies, and also what was done in the Stargate program, the U.S. government's program, have strong evidence that people can pick up information from a great distance.
And there is evidence that security services, certainly in the Cold War, and who knows right up until this date, have used that as a technique.
You know, have actually discovered it's a thing and have trained people in the so-called protocols of, for example, remote viewing.
And they've actually used it to strategic benefit.
Yes.
Actually, I co-authored a book with Edwin May, who was the program director for the U.S. government's program for 11 years.
It's a book called ESP Wars.
And it covers the history of that program, the U.S. government, but it also includes contributions by the Russians.
Ed and our main viewer from our Army project, Joseph McMonagall, got to know their Russian counterparts in the late 90s and were able to get contributions directly from the former Soviet researchers who were involved directly in their work.
And the evidence, and actually the evidence has just been published in four volumes.
The declassified documents have been collected by Ed May in the Stargate archives, which are now available.
And it's overwhelming how good some of it was.
Now, you know, it's not like science fiction good, but it was good enough for 17 out of 21 federal agencies to continue to come back to the project to give them new tasks on a regular basis.
Of course, the problem with people who use remote viewing in the civilian sphere is that a lot of us who are interested in these things, we read and hear an awful lot of presentations by remote viewers.
There was one that I recently heard about 9-11 and that apparently 9-11 was masterminded by some evil genius, a group of people who staged the whole thing and they had absolutely no value for human life, no feeling, no emotion, no nothing.
And you know, how can you verify something like that?
And the people who do various remote viewing projects on let's get into the mind of Hitler, there's no way really to verify any of that, is there?
Well, a lot of it, that's the problem is a lot of the people who are, first of all, a lot of people who claim to have been part of the project, the government, U.S. government project, may have been there for a very short time and washed out.
There are a few people that Ed has referenced who are out there on the talk circuit and have been for many years, and they've written books who definitely washed out.
They were not any good at it.
So they're capitalizing on the fact that they were part of that program, even without telling people that they essentially got fired.
They washed out.
There are also a couple of methodologies that are being used to teach people remote viewing.
One of which, what's called coordinate or controlled remote viewing, was a response to a CIA request to be able to teach and train their own agents.
And what the program, the people in the project itself, the scientists found, is that that was not a successful protocol as compared to other protocols or simpler protocols that they actually had that work very well and can be taught to people in probably a couple of hours.
But nevertheless, you're telling me, though, that within the military, when it was done in a serious and systematic way, then there was evidence that suggests that remote viewing works.
Oh, absolutely.
Absolutely.
And again, some of the evidence is in the book ESP Wars.
Some of it's in a couple of other books by Joe McMonagall.
And then the Stargate Archives has the official declassified actual records.
But America said that it discontinued its remote viewing program, military program, I think 25 years or more ago.
If it is so good, they must still be using it on some level.
Well, you know, the problem was that it became during the Clinton administration when money was tight for the military and they were closing bases left and right.
The program was handed back to the CIA.
It had been with the Defense Department.
It was handed back to the CIA.
And the current administration, the CIA, didn't want to touch anything that was, as they called it, had a political giggle factor.
It was never really sanctioned by a lot of folks because it seemed so weird and strange and like so many other things our government does, of course.
So it was plain to the electorate then they were afraid that electors and people in various constituencies would say, is that what our tax dollars are going for?
Yeah, because actually, you know, there'd been a lot of criticism from the skeptics organization saying, how could you spend any money on this?
This is, you know, absolute garbage.
Never pointing out the other garbage the U.S. government spends money on.
But Ed May and Joe McGimonical.
And Joe was the number one viewer.
He got a Legion of Merit award from the government, from the Army, for his work in remote viewing.
He was the most successful one.
They went, I guess you could say Ed talks about haunting the halls of Congress to try to get support.
And then also the Pentagon, because they had a lot of contacts in the Pentagon.
And there was support from individual places and individuals in both the Pentagon and the Senate and the Congress, but not enough to overcome that giggle factor.
And then there were some other political internal issues around the funding.
So they never could get it off the ground.
And when 9-11 happened, they went back and they tried to resurrect the program in some fashion, even offering to do work for the government at a low or no cost.
And they were rebuffed saying that this, you know, we're not touching this because it's just too, it's politically volatile.
So I guess politics is involved in all of these things then, because we know that both the U.S. and U.K. are involved in technologies that will allow technical surveillance.
You know, I was talking to somebody only last night as we record this about a thing called the Gorgon Stair, which you may or may not have heard about.
It's some technology that can allow vast areas to be surveilled in a very efficient, for the surveyors, from their point of view, in a very efficient way.
But remote viewing could be much more effective.
Well, that's it.
That's the other side of it is that there's an effectiveness rate for remote viewing, and it's certainly not as effective as having an on-the-ground agent who is observing everything or technology that is observing everything.
And since the 1990s, the ability to surveil and get information technologically has jumped in leaps and bounds to a point where they're spending a lot of money on that.
So why spend any money on remote viewing except maybe as a backup?
From your own researches, can you think of one great case, perhaps in the military arena, perhaps in the political arena, where remote viewing has scored as close to 100% as you can get?
The one that kind of pops off the top of my head was a submarine, the launch of the Typhoon-class, the Akira-class submarine that the Russians, the Soviets actually had.
It was a huge submarine.
It was a submarine that you might have seen in the movie The Hunt for Red October.
And months before the submarine was actually launched, there was a huge warehouse and they were building something.
And it was somewhat inland, not very far inland, but there was a channel that was there that they dug.
And we had spy satellite photos of the warehouse and that there was a lot of activity and construction and military activity in this area, but nobody knew exactly what was in that warehouse, what was being actually done, what was being constructed.
So they tasked Joe McMonagall with looking into that warehouse.
They gave him a photograph of the spy satellite had of it, and he started describing a double-hulled, huge submarine.
He drew pictures of it, described it, and said it was going to be launched within the next three to four months.
And it was pretty much, A, they couldn't confirm that because we didn't have any assets on the ground.
So that was information that was not very actionable at the time.
And B, the idea of building a submarine that far inland made no sense.
So that was another piece of it.
And then within, oh, a little over three months later, the sub was actually launched.
And it looked almost exactly like what he had described and had a propulsion system, used a different kind of propulsion system.
It didn't have typical propellers that Joe had also described.
Right.
Well, I mean, that's an astonishing hit.
I suppose part of the technique, it's not only the person who's doing the remote viewing, but it's the people who are doing the interpretation.
Their minds have to be open enough to spot something that may actually be true, even if it seems unlikely.
Absolutely.
And part of the issue with the remote during the ESP in general, and this is the failure of ESP, is that very often it's only partial.
It only gives us a part of the jigsaw puzzle.
And if it's used in conjunction with other intelligence information that might give the other part or an overlap with the remote during information, then it becomes extremely useful.
But if it's a piece of information that can't be used, even though it's accurate without having any explanation as to why it's accurate, if it's not actionable, they can't do anything with it.
Now, isn't that fascinating?
It sounds like we're jumping around topics here, but I want to kind of introduce my audience to you.
So I want to go back to the ghost stuff because a lot of people in the U.S. and around the world know you as the ghost guy.
And you do investigations.
You've done a lot of them.
I've spoken to a lot of people on the radio and other places who say that they do ghost investigations.
There are groups all over the UK, and I'm sure there are groups all over the U.S. We have close to 4,000 groups in the United States now.
Of varying quality, I guess.
Some of them have equipment.
Some of them don't have much equipment.
They're all enthusiastic.
But I think to some extent, some of them muddy the water because they're happy amateurs.
They've been watching Scooby-Doo.
So I'll ask you, when you go in to investigate a report, and maybe we can talk about some specific ones, how do you go about it?
Well, first of all, the technology that you see on TV that ghost runners are using, most of them don't even use it correctly if they have anything decent, but certainly the communication technology, none of it has been shown to actually do what it says it does.
And we have other possible explanations for a lot of even the spirit boxes and all those other things.
You mean even the electromagnetic measuring devices?
No, that measures electromagnetic fields, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's picking up a ghost.
Right.
See, the reason, and in fact, Tony Cornell, who was a researcher for the Society for Psychical Research, was one of the first people to really try to bring in environmental sensors back in the late 1960s using electromagnetics and temperature sensors and other things.
And what we're trying to do when we're using any sort of technology, it's typically environmental because we're trying to See if there's any changes or unusual effects in the environment that correlate directly to the people's experiences.
So, when I go on an investigation, the first important thing for us is interviewing the witnesses.
If you don't have witness testimony, if it's not current, in other words, if things haven't happened for several months, all I can say to them is, well, let it call us when it happens again, because it's like a cold case in police work.
You don't know all the factors because it happened months ago or even years ago.
I have people calling me telling me they had an experience five years ago and want to know what it was.
And I can run through the possibilities, but I can't really investigate anything.
So you do an awful lot of groundwork to that extent.
And that sounds strange to me in that.
Not strange, but it sounds interesting to me in that you will then surely, unless you're a very, which you are, a very good investigator, you know, a human being, if they've interviewed somebody and you've been told the same story over and over again, it's a powerful story, you're going to go into the location looking for that.
We're going to go into the location looking for alternative explanations for that first.
So the rule in parapsychology, and it's the same with research, is the reason we've had to add more and more controls to our experiments is to remove all the other possible explanations.
So in any case, when we're doing the interviews, we do the interviews usually with the people.
Let's say it's a family, we do them in one spot, and then we will take them, have them show us around the house and explain exactly where things happen and how it happened and when it happened.
And then we might even separate them.
Typically, we do separate them and again ask again.
Because what we're trying to do is determine for each event that they report, that they experienced, is there an explanation other than something paranormal or psychic?
So we're looking to eliminate all the garbage and reduce it down to what might really be psychic or paranormal.
And then we still have to vet that and see if there's any other explanation as we go deeper into it.
And are you also looking for the phenomena to repeat itself for you?
Hopefully, you know, that would be great if that'll happen.
I do actually work with psychics and mediums who I vet in various ways, who are simply another form of sensor.
We do use electromagnetic field detectors and temperature sensors.
But again, we're looking for those changes or correlations for anomalies in the environment to where and when people have those experiences.
And one of the psychic mediums I used to work with who passed away a number of years ago, I worked with her for many years, and she had worked verifiably with law enforcement, in fact.
Her name was Annette Martin.
And whenever people asked us, you know, what's your favorite piece of equipment?
And she would always jump up and say, I am, which was true.
Because human sensors, you know, the fact is, and this is a fact, human beings detect things that are psychic and paranormal.
I mean, that's how we get these cases.
You have an experience.
They're all subjective.
And the devices will pick up things in the environment, but nothing that is detectable from a psychic or paranormal perspective.
It may be the impact of that on the environment.
And the communication devices, frankly, many of them don't do what they say they do in terms of many of them not truly random.
There's all sorts of other possibilities for many of them.
But even so, we have evidence that living people can affect machinery or technology or electronics from a lot of psychokinesis research.
So we're not even sure who's causing those unusual things on those devices, even if the devices are not, you know, are working properly.
And as you say people can affect devices and environments, and you've only got to look at poltergeist cases that are quite often tied back to individuals living in the location.
Yeah, for us, and there's a slight difference in the way the U.S. uses poltergeist versus UK, as I found out over the years talking to Guy Lion Playfair and a few other folks.
We separate the Poltergeist.
The term poltergeist refers to cases only with living agents.
And we also might have an apparition case, a ghost case where the apparition moves things.
But they're very, very different because the source is different.
And even the activity, the form of the activity is different.
Right.
So you're much more specific.
I didn't know this.
And, you know, I did a whole program with Guy Lyon Playfair from his home.
He is much missed, a tremendous researcher of the Enfield Poltergeist.
But in the US, you tend to talk about these phenomena as being connected with human beings only.
Whereas here in the UK, we tend to think it might be ghosts or spirits as well.
Right.
So we see poltergeists as one of three, the residual, the imprint hauntings, the apparition cases, and then poltergeist cases.
Whereas in the UK, you have the imprint hauntings and you have poltergeists where there's physical activity.
You could have either an apparition causing it or a living person causing it.
Right.
Okay.
Well, that's one thing I didn't learn.
I've been doing this show for years.
Thank you for expanding my knowledge on that.
Has anything ever really...
And we never really thought about this.
Apparently, nobody picked up on that.
It's nice to know that Guy's records, the tapes and what have you, have been finally listened to and decoded and have now been published in book form.
I think that's a marvelous thing by somebody from the Society for Psychical Research here in the UK, who I spoke with a few weeks back.
So it's good to know that that is continuing.
Have you ever been in a situation where you've gone in to do some research?
And even though you are a seasoned researcher and you've done many investigations, whatever is there has actually scared you?
The living people have sometimes scared me.
My grandmother in Liverpool used to say, it's not the dead you need to be afraid of, it's the living.
She was that up.
Right.
She's absolutely right.
There is nothing I've experienced from a paranormal perspective that has been scary, but I have been in situations with some crazy living people or drunk living people or people in some altered states that they shouldn't have been in.
And it really is nothing.
It is the living that you have to be afraid of.
So are you saying that in cases where people claim that they are living in locations that are seriously haunted, where bad things are happening, that quite often, maybe all the time, Those people are perhaps the root of it themselves because they have issues that are somehow attracting something.
They might be.
I mean, you know, there are those instances where it seems that people who have issues are attracting something.
And honestly, just because someone might have schizophrenia doesn't mean that there's not anything real going on at the same time or that it's misdiagnosed.
I knew a psychiatrist who worked in the field of parapsychology for many years who felt that some of the people he was seeing in psychiatric facilities who were schizophrenic were actually not, that they actually were picking up on information psychically.
And he worked with them from that perspective and got them to stop being psychic.
And they were done with schizophrenia.
Wow.
But it seems that some people, yeah, some people who are disturbed, neurotic, you know, there's this whole idea that some spirits might attach to living people.
Not something we've been able to prove, but certainly psychics and mediums talk about it and other people do that if you are a disturbed individual or if you're alcoholic or neurotic, you might attract a spirit that was the same in life and this deceased person is now hanging around you.
So literally a kindred spirit.
Yeah, it's a kindred spirit that's trying to feed off of you, just trying to get that hit of alcohol from the living.
You talked about attachments, entities that may be attached to people.
I have certainly interviewed a few very credible ghost investigators, people who do this very seriously, who've been very concerned when they actually have brought things home.
Apparently that happens.
Well, I mean, people have seen a particular spirit from a restaurant that I've been working with for many, many years at some of the conferences I've spoken at.
She's tagged along with me.
I don't really worry about, yeah, you know, well, the thing to remember is that ghosts are people too.
You know, they're dead people, but they're still people.
Hang on.
So you have a ghostly groupie?
Apparently I do.
Yes.
She hasn't been around lately too much.
How did you acquire her?
I have been working with a restaurant south of San Francisco called the Moss Beach Distillery since 1991 and did a lot of work in the 90s, especially in early 2000s there.
I did a lot of continued investigations, doing continual interviews with new witnesses, just being there.
We've gone in with different psychics and mediums and different TV shows, in fact.
And at one point, Annette Martin, who I just mentioned a few minutes ago, she had a really good relationship with the ghost as well, Kate, with the entity that's there, who's been around since the 1930s.
And what we got from all the witnesses, the people who work there, is that everybody felt she was kind of very, very fun and really enjoyed the atmosphere and nothing ever negative, nothing at all.
And what we got through communication with Annette was that she was really liked us.
One of the things that I do, and it's different than certainly you see the ghost hunting groups do, is we go in with respect, not just to the people who we're working with, you know, the live witnesses.
We also go in with respect to the dead.
And we like to have a lighthearted approach because the fact is that living people find a little humor, you know, not making fun of anything, but a little humor, a little lightheartedness, much friendlier and easier to get along with.
And we assume that the dead would too.
And so far, we've had a lot of good luck.
So this one particular entity, Kate, ended up, I had an experience behind the bar late after closing.
We were doing an overnight and Annette had spoken with Kate for our large group, including some reporters.
And I was beloved behind the bar and I felt something moving through me.
I mean, it was almost like standing in the wave in the surf on a beach, like something pushing me either way.
And I got a mental image of this woman walking back and forth through me.
And it was, frankly, it was very giggly.
I got the feeling she was giggling, laughing the whole time.
Well, you know, like you see in ghost movies when the ghost is standing still and a car drives right through them.
Yeah, so yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So that's what that is.
That's amazing to hear that that happens.
That's the feeling I got.
So it was like front to back, then back to front.
It was very subjective.
I had a mental image of her and what she was wearing and her jewelry and such.
And then Annette and two other psychics came around the corner from another room after it had been going on with, because I started timing it.
Again, not being afraid.
I was timing it, how long this was going to last.
And they came around the corner and looked at me and started laughing.
And Annette said, she's walking through you, isn't she?
And then I felt it go away.
And somebody and one of the other psychics said, she's walking away.
So ever since that time, I was at a couple of conferences and there happened to be mediums in the audience.
And one walked up to me and said, who was that woman?
And starts describing Kate standing next to me when I was talking about the restaurant.
And at the same conference, three other people came up, all of whom did not know each other and said the same thing and pointed the same spot and described her the same way.
And this has happened several other times.
So you have your own personal accretion, if that's the right word.
You have your own personal entity.
Do you communicate with her?
Does she communicate with you?
No, I really don't.
I mean, I may be sensitive enough to pick up on little things here and there, but I have not had that kind of direct communication at all with her.
It sounds to me like you don't want to.
Really?
It sounded to me there that you didn't want to.
Particularly, you didn't want to engage in a dialogue.
I would love to.
I would actually love to.
Right.
Right.
And we can only guess, can't we, as to why she has decided to attach herself limpet-like at times to you and actually travel with you.
I didn't even know that entities or whatever you might want to call them can do that.
Well, the traveling thing, you know, it's folklore that ghosts are stuck in locations.
First of all, they're not stuck where they died.
They usually go to where they lived, whether it's their home or a bar, restaurant, hotel, someplace where they had positive.
It seems that where they had positive memories is where they go, typically, unless they're psychologically disturbed or sad or depressed or something else, which case they might go certainly stick around where they die.
They don't go to cemeteries.
That's just the last person any person.
You have to think about living people.
Where would living people, if you were alive and you died and were hanging around as a ghost, where would you want to be?
And in some cultures, for example, in Japan, they would go and hang around their relatives because that's what they do given the religion and the beliefs there.
It varies, but they are not limited to the location as long as they know that they're not limited to the location.
Otherwise, if they don't know any better, they'll just stay right there.
But is it true that the vast majority of people who die go on to something else?
Because if everybody became a ghost, then there would be millions and millions of them.
You are absolutely right.
And the vast majority, I'd say sometimes somewhere between 95 and 98% of all ghostly experiences people have are usually one time.
It's a friend or relative or loved one who comes to say goodbye, usually at the moment of death, up to even a week, a week after, but it's usually between 24 and 48 hours, and then they're never heard from again.
And that's it.
And that, you know, certainly in my own life experience, that seems to be so.
So if most of them and most of us are going on to something else, do you have a handle on what we might be going on to?
Well, the only information we actually have would be through spirits that are coming back through spirit mediums, through evidential mediums.
And, you know, the agreement is it's a nice, pleasant place.
You get all sorts of similar information from mediums around the world.
To me, though, you know, I'm again a science fiction reader, and there was a book by Philip Jose Farmer, and I think he was the person who may have said this.
I may be misremembering that it was him, but in his book, Traitor to the Living, he talked about the afterlife as being so different that we could not even imagine it in human terms.
So, and which is interesting in that some of the mediums have said, when I've asked this question, I said, you know, how could it possibly be this nice, pleasant place with a town and the whole bit?
And the medium said to me, well, it's so different, they're only relating it in human terms, the only terms I can actually imagine it in.
And the medium actually said, I could not conceive of it anything other than in human terms.
So that's the image they're giving me.
So we have to find ways to explain it, as we do with so many things.
So by the sounds of that, then you are convinced pretty much that this particular life, which we are going through at the moment, is not all there is.
I am convinced that.
Again, I have to look at each case and the evidence differently.
But personally, I believe that consciousness survives the death of the body and has some form of existence afterwards.
Yes.
Well, that is going to be very good news for an awful lot of people, any of us, in fact, who've lost.
You are involved in an organization, I think, that works with families on this sort of level, aren't you?
Yes, that's the Forever Family Foundation, and it's foreverfamilyfoundation.org.
It's free to join.
It is an organization that was actually started by a couple that lost their daughter to a car accident.
And through a series of events where they did not seek out a medium, a medium came through with information and sought them out, which is interesting in itself.
They started this foundation because their grief was ameliorated by conversing with the medium and having that whole process and experience.
And they found others who were as well.
So they started this nonprofit organization to support the work of spirit mediums, of evidential spirit mediums in the family grieving process and also support the work of scientists who are doing look or looking at evidence of life after death and the dissemination of information about that.
They have a certification process for mediums to make sure that they're on the up and up and that they really can come through with really good information, with useful information.
And actually, the organization runs Grief Retrief.
We're doing one later this month in Connecticut, in fact.
And how do you feel personally about, look, as we get older in life, in your 20s and 30s, you think you're immortal.
You're going to go on forever.
You're going to keep achieving constantly.
And then, you know, you get to 40 and then a little north of that.
And the realities of existence suddenly hit you and you realize that the party's going to end one day.
So what I'm asking you really, Lloyd, is as we get towards the end of this, have your researches made you feel any easier in yourself about the end of all this for you?
Yes.
But as you said, getting older makes you less easy about it.
You know, even though I'm convinced there is life after death, I am not in a hurry to find out.
Well, no, true enough, because the great imponderable, isn't it?
I mean, like you, I suspect, I don't particularly, you know, mind about leaving this behind once I've achieved all I need to achieve.
And it's nice to think there's something else beyond this that you can go on to and develop further.
I suppose we're all curious about that ultimate enigma, that ultimate mystery.
What happens when you cross over, if you want to call it that?
You know, what about the end?
Is it going to hurt?
Does the pain stop at some point?
Are you taken out of it at some point?
Do your relatives come and guide you through to whatever comes next?
All we have are anecdotes, as far as I know now.
That's right.
That is all we have right now.
We have consistent patterns of those anecdotes, which is really interesting in itself.
And I think that there's enough here.
Of course, when you talk about pain, people who have terminal illnesses go through excruciating pain before they get to that point.
So the question is, it doesn't seem that the pain consists of or exists after you die.
Certainly, you don't have a body anymore.
So the things, unless you're imagining that, you know, because the mind can imagine all sorts of horrible things as well.
And it doesn't look like you change that much, at least immediately after death.
Probably something's going on on the other side, as they call it.
But the ones who stick around here pretty much are as much the same personalities as they were before, which is why I can say that ghosts are rarely ever evil or malicious or malevolent because most people are not.
That doesn't mean they weren't sociopaths.
That's a very balanced way of looking at it.
Listen, I know that your time is limited and you have to be somewhere else.
One final question.
You know, I am Mr. One More Question.
So this is the one more question.
What are you working on right now?
At the moment, I'm just prepping for a conference in Hawaii, which I get to go to in a couple of weeks, the Hawaii Paracon.
But I'm working on a couple of book ideas, one of which is actually kind of a memoir of my adventures in the paranormal and in magic, in fact, in that whole world as well.
Well, I hope we can talk about that in the future.
When you get to Hawaii, say hello to Allison John Lynn, who I think is involved in organizing that thing, and also Lopaca.
If you haven't met Lopaca, I interviewed him a couple of months ago.
You'll love him.
Well, yeah, actually, I know him very well.
He's the reason I'm going, actually.
And I've been conversing with Allison as well.
Oh, boy.
Well, listen, I did a radio show from Maui back in 1996, and it was the most wonderful, mind-blowing, terrific, gorgeous experience.
So I'm very, very jealous.
I can't wait to get there.
Lloyd, what's your website so people can check you out online?
You know, my website's actually down right now for Reconstruction.
It will be mindreader.com.
But if you go to, you can see it at tinyurl.com slash mindreader-com.
That's the easy way to get to it.
But people can follow me on Twitter.
I put a lot of things to retweet stuff for my colleagues.
It's just at prof paranormal, P-R-O-F Paranormal.
Well, listen, thank you for making time for me.
I hope it's the first of a number of conversations, and I wish you well with all that you do.
Thank you very much.
Lloyd Auerbach, tell me what you think about him.
Go to the website, theunexplained.tv, and give me your thoughts or any suggestions on anything that you'd like to do.
I can't do the show without you.
More great guests in the pipeline here on The Unexplained.
So until next, we meet here on The Unexplained Online.
My name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained.
I am in London where it's very warm.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm.
And above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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